“Challenging the Crowd in Whispers, Not Shouts.”

A wolf’s primal instinct is form a pack for survival. The slightest deviation from the pack could leave him exiled, and left to die. Our society today is a dog-eat-dog world, politically, socially, and economically. With the stock market rising and falling daily, why isn’t the government warning the citizens before the drop? Or then when it drops letting us know when things will start looking up? In the New York Times article, “Challenging the Crowd in Whispers, Not Shouts,” Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, knew that the economy was going to fall before it happened in 2008. With the “housing boom” of 2006, there was bound to be a downfall at some point. There was a bubble that burst, with what seemed like no warning. The author of “Groupthink,” Irving L. Janis explains that, “panels of experts could make colossal mistakes.” These panels need the public’s approval, so they “self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.” He goes on to explain that people thrive for social acceptance and compete for stature only to have their ideologies follow.